Four or five Austrian couples in their fifties and sixties arrived in Motovun yesterday evening. Before they went to the hotel, where they were staying, they stopped for a few drinks at Marko’s on the lower square. There was much yelling and laughing before they proceeded to the hotel a couple of hours later. The archway connecting the lower and upper square turned out to be a bit too much for many of them. All of them stumbled, but a few of them tripped over the cobblestones and fell. One of them fell into Benjamin’s doorway. Pulling him out of it was quite a chore for his tipsy mates.

To everyone’s surprise, the Austrians appeared at Benjamin’s a short while later. Apparently, they only splashed their faces with water at the hotel. On their way into the restaurant, they behaved as well as they could, but they got quite rowdy as soon as they sat down and ordered more drinks. Another group of guests fled from the restaurant in a jiffy. They were Austrians, too, but better-behaved ones. Annoyed by the hubbub, I also got up and wished the Pahović family all the best with their unruly guests. Over lunch at Benjamin’s today, I learned the sequel to the story.

The drunken Austrians left soon after I did. They were quite angry about everyone else’s flight. And so they ended up at the hotel restaurant. As it happened, the Austrians who had fled from them a short while earlier where there already. The two groups demanded to be placed far apart, but they spent a good part of the evening trading insults with each other. For instance, they would order the worst and cheapest sorts of local liquors for the others. But the story ended well. Once both groups got drunk enough, they got together and kept drinking till wee hours. Austrians versus Austrians, to the lasting amusement of the hotel crew.